Small Black is excited to announce their new album, Best Blues, due out October 16th on Jagjaguwar. The group’s third full length release, written and recorded at their Brooklyn home studio, nicknamed 222, showcases a mature band still evolving, and embracing the unpredictable. Josh Kolenik (keys, vocals), Ryan Heyner (guitar, keys, vocals), Juan Pieczanski (bass, guitar) and Jeff Curtin (drums) have been recording, writing, and often living together, throughout the life of the band, establishing a closeness that has allowed them to achieve easy creativity and unspoken chemistry.

After a year of recording, the band enlisted mixer Nicholas Vernhes (The War on Drugs, Deerhunter) of Rare Book Room Studio to help complete Best Blues. The result is Small Black in their sweet spot: the smoky intersection of considered and vulnerable songwriting and loose, almost nonchalant ambience. The addition of piano flourishes, trumpet (Darby Cicci of The Antlers), hidden acoustic guitars and Kaede Ford’s ethereal vocals provide new dimensions to the band’s already expansive sonic palette.

Gracing the cover of Best Blues is a mysterious woman walking alone on the dunes at dusk, amid pockmarked sand. She’s the subject of a found photo, one of many rescued with the warmth of a blow dryer and a fireplace, by singer Josh Kolenik after Hurricane Sandy flooded his family’s Long Island home. The faded image offers clues and invites viewers to construct their own narrative, one that escapes even the picture’s taker, Kolenik’s father.

To put it simply, Best Blues is an album about loss, the specific loss of precious people in our lives, but also the loss of memories and the difficult fight to preserve them. “I spent months trying to scan all these images and letters, most covered with ocean dirt, and in doing so discovered what people often find in their family’s past: that they are a hell of a lot like those who’d come before,” says Kolenik. The chorus of lead single “Boys Life,” debuted via The New York Times’ T Magazine and Sirius XMU, echoes this sentiment with the refrain “pictures of youth/picturing you,” over a track that itself was an old demo re-discovered by accident by the band, during a late night jam session at a cabin in Upstate New York.

Small Black will tour this fall in support of Best Blues and a full list of dates is below.

BEST BLUES TRACKLIST:
1. Personal Best
2. No One Wants It To Happen To You
3. Boys Life
4. The Closer I Look
5. Big Ideas, Pt. 2
6. Back At Belle’s
7. Between Leos
8. Checkpoints
9. Smoke Around The Bend
10. XX Century

With a bolstered sound that incorporates funk-infused synths and emotionally charged lyrics, Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s third album, Multi-Love, is their strongest to date. Now, the band is proud to share a brand new video for the track “Ur Life One Night” (premiered on Rolling Stone), featuring a vast and kaleidoscopic collection of stories, colors, and visual effects. Director Manoj Leonel Jahson sought out inspiration in Traditional Asian Art through the incorporation of Mughai-era miniature paintings and more. Here is what he had to say about the film:

“When we first spoke with UMO, the idea of creating something abstract yet fun, for their single ‘Ur Life, One Night’ sounded very exciting. I am deeply inspired by the quirky Indian magical-realism from our mythology and wanted to create something rooted but still visually appealing. The music lent a dream-like quality and the lyric pushed us to the motif of the Goddess being pursued, yet always being out of reach.”

After being praised as a standout performance at Bonnaroo and touring all through May and June, UMO return to the road with performances across the U.S. and Europe. Upcoming tour dates include a stops at Austin City Limits, Outside Lands, and FYF festivals. Multi-Love is out now via Jagjaguwar. All tour dates are below:

“The Oregon trio aren’t just for acid-trip casualties anymore. On their third album, they punch up their psychedelic sound with funky grooves and singer Ruban Nielson’s tales of polyamory and alienation in the age of Portlandia.” – Entertainment Weekly (“12 Best Albums of 2015 (So Far)”)

“Brighter and more polished than the band’s ever sounded.” – Billboard

“Names aren’t named, but the intimacy, awkwardness and emotional nakedness on display might have been hard to take were they not wrapped in the sweetest, catchiest, most impeccably crafted music Unknown Mortal Orchestra has made.” – NPR Music

“Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s forthcoming third LP, Multi-Love, is Ruban Nielson’s strongest record yet, a sublime mash of psychedelia and R&B that incredibly evokes a Stevie Wonder — that is, if Stevie Wonder was from New Zealand and strongly considered the existence of chemtrails.” – The FADER

“Funk has sashayed its way back into the forefront of music, and almost no one is incorporating it better than Unknown Mortal Orchestra.” – Stereogum

Recently long listed for the 2015 Polaris Award, Viet Cong haven’t stayed still since their critically acclaimed debut self-titled album was released earlier this year. A broken hand couldn’t even stop a commanding and powerful run of SXSW shows and since then Viet Cong have toured extensively, selling out venues around the world and proving time and time again why they are one of the most exciting bands to emerge in 2015.

Additionally, they are announcing a new role – as curators of Sonic City Festival 2015 in De Kreun, Belgium. Taking over the reins after previous curators Liars, Deerhoof, Dälek, SUUNS, Beak> and James Holden, Viet Cong are selecting this year’s lineup – the first wave of which includes Chelsea Wolfe, Metz, Lightning Bolt, Suuns + Jerusalem In My Heart, Protomartyr and Shabazz Palaces.

Since Viet Cong’s release back in January music fans and critics have been hailing the album as one of the most important records in recent years. It’s also been making its way onto various mid year Best Of 2015 lists, Stereogum write “This is a tense record, but all of its unease is pulled taught by Viet Cong’s meticulously-ordered, audacious arrangements. They envelop you.”Spin included the album in their coverage telling us “Viet Cong, a krautrock/garage/psych/noise/post-punk amalgam that basically operates under its own ecosystem…. Considering the record’s ambitious, desolate scope, maybe Viet Cong tried to write the last post-punk album – and it would be okay if that turned out to be the case?”Gorilla vs Bear also featured the album at number 19 on favorite albums of 2015 so far and Paste named the track “March Of Progress” as one of the 25 Best Songs of 2015 (So Far) saying “…the track captures everything that makes the band so captivating.”

In 2005, Pitchfork called Black Mountain‘s Self Titled debut “a rollicking, wildly adventurous reconfiguring of 1960s and 70s nostalgia that’s as duty-bound to the present as it is sympathetic to the past,” and 10 years later, the sentiment is the same. We’ve repackaged this influential record with a bonus LP of demos and b-sides, updated album art with silver foil text, a gatefold sleeve, and we have a limited number on grey vinyl.